


Identity Crisis

by Setcheti



Series: Tremors: the Subtext [20]
Category: Star Trek: Enterprise, Tremors: The Series
Genre: Introspection, Light Angst, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-09
Updated: 2013-11-09
Packaged: 2017-12-31 23:34:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,370
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1037721
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Setcheti/pseuds/Setcheti
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Nancy is having a crisis of conscience.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Identity Crisis

Nancy watched the sparse bubbles of detergent swirl on top of the mineral-heavy water in her sink as she added dishes to wash, the random patterns they made matching the swirl and flow of the thoughts inside her head that she hadn’t been able to steady yet that day. Usually she could, the general atmosphere of the town lent itself to that. When things changed in Perfection, they tended to change quickly and then go back to being the same as they’d always been. It had been that way for years, for as long as Nancy had been there – it was one of the things she’d liked about the dusty little town, back when she’d first moved to the so-called desert paradise, when she’d been newly divorced and Mindy had still been a toddler. The rhythm of life was very natural in the valley, slow and steady most of the time and with a certain sameness to it that would on occasion be briefly disrupted by something quick and different before sliding back into steadiness again. Even the appearance of the graboids and the other mutations hadn’t changed that very much.

Until the cyobactyls, of course, but they had proved to be the exception. The crabions hadn’t even lasted two weeks. Oh, they’d looked like a neverending disaster in the making at first…and then Nancy had thrown a pot of tomato soup at one and just that quickly the crabions had been on their way to extinction.

Because the fast-moving, high-jumping, quick-spreading crablike menaces were resistant to most pesticides and poisons, but they apparently had a severe reaction to basil. Consequently, everyone in town had smelled like Italian cooking for a week while the spraying had been going on, and every house in the Valley now had at least a pot or two of the fragrant herb scenting the air on a windowsill or porch. And at the town meeting Twitchell had convened at Jodi’s store earlier that morning, they’d been discussing seeding some hybrid varieties around the valley that would hopefully prevent the crabions or anything related to them from ever coming back.

Nancy wondered if it was wrong of her to worry that they were encouraging the propagation of non-native plants…or if it was more wrong of her not to be worried _enough_. Once upon a time she knew she would have been up in arms about the environmental irresponsibility of such a quickly made and short-sighted decision; she’d have filled everyone’s ears with examples of similar undertakings that had ended in disaster, written letters to newspapers and congressmen, maybe even planned a protest. But now it was just a vague concern, mostly outweighed by the idea that stopping the mutations took precedence over almost anything else. She picked a glass out of the dishwater and frowned at her distorted reflection in the bubble-streaked surface. When had she started turning into Burt? She had definitely changed, and she didn’t think it was for the better.

A polite knock on the screen door startled her out of her thoughts, and she almost dropped the glass. The sand-damaged hinges whined plaintively as Malcolm’s accented tenor called out, “Nancy, I’ve brought back that plate you left at the store…”

And then he stepped into the kitchen and saw the look on her face, the door whining closing without slamming behind him – the door never slammed when Malcolm used it, although it did for everyone else. He put the aforementioned plate on the counter and took a step towards her. “What’s wrong?” he asked. “Is it the same thing that was bothering you earlier, or something else?”

She supposed she shouldn’t have been surprised; Malcolm tended to notice things that other people missed. “I didn’t think I was…”

“You were clearly disturbed by the idea of encouraging the hybrid plants to propagate in the wild.” He shrugged. “I admit to having my own concerns about that – mainly because they are _hybrid_ plants, and therefore could mutate in unpredictable ways – but not to the extent that I could see you were bothered by it.”

“I think I’m more concerned that I’m not concerned enough about it,” Nancy admitted. “This sort of thing has come up before, and I feel like I’ve just been offering token protests to soothe my own conscience, not objecting because I really believe that things should be done differently. I’m starting to wonder if I’ve turned into a different person, if I’m not really _me_ anymore.”

She hadn’t expected him to understand that – she wasn’t sure she understood it herself – but his response was, “I was afraid it might be that.” He leaned against the counter with a sigh. “You are the same person you always were, Nancy,” he assured her. “Yes, your priorities, your values, have shifted somewhat…”

She shook her head. “My priorities are who I am! My entire adult life that’s who I’ve been…”

“I don’t believe most of your adult life was spent trying to survive random onslaughts of mutated monsters,” Malcolm cut her off. “Humans adapt, Nancy, it’s a fundamental characteristic of our species. We adapt, and we survive. A philosopher might debate your right to live over the right of, say, a cyobactyl, but that is because the philosopher is debating that question from a distance. He is not engaged in a life-or-death struggle with the monster, he does not have to worry about it devouring his life and livelihood or harming his family and friends. You, on the other hand, do have those worries. Which means your knowledge that there is no room for true debate in your current circumstances is merely a sign that you have adapted your beliefs in order to survive, not that you have abandoned those beliefs altogether.”

“But…” She made a helpless gesture with her hands. “There should always be room for the debate, no matter what the circumstances are.”

He caught one of her hands and clasped it, squeezing. “Not here, there isn’t,” he said. “Not if you want to survive – not if you want all of us to survive.” He made a face. “I’d rather you didn’t have to learn to think this way, but…Nancy, if we fail to stop the mutations, if we fall to them, what do you think will happen to the next traveler who passes through here? Or to Agent Twitchell when he comes to see why we haven’t been in contact? What will happen to the nearest town, and all those farmers and ranchers who make their homes between here and there? If we do not fight for our own survival at all costs, how many of those innocent, oblivious people will die?”

She started to be flip and say all of them because Twitchell would have the valley nuked, but this was Malcolm asking, not Burt, so she stopped herself and actually thought about it. Twitchell only came out about once a month unless they called him. She had an idea that Burt was sending in reports, probably Casey and Roger as well, but if a report didn’t come in how long would it be before someone decided that something was wrong? And even then they’d just send someone out to check, and that person would most likely get eaten too – that’s what had happened to four phone company technicians and two state troopers when the graboids had first appeared. But even if the first person sent to check the Valley didn’t get eaten the minute they got out of their car, it was entirely possible that they wouldn’t be able to figure out what had happened. No government agent who’d come out to date had been able to do that without considerable help from the residents of Perfection. If those residents were all dead…

…Then that left the highway running out of the valley unguarded, and the people in Bixby were sitting ducks. They wouldn’t know they needed to defend themselves, and even once they realized it there would be no one to show them how or from what. People would die and the mutations would spread, contaminating everything with Mixmaster as they went, laying the groundwork for new mutations to arise. And it would just go on, and on, and on. Possibly forever.

“All of them,” she said with horrified certainty. “All of them.”

He nodded. “Exactly. Our job is to stand between them and a very possible, possibly very horrible death – one they have no idea they’re even being protected from. And because we’ve protected them so well, they will never really understand why they have the luxury to debate our ethical dilemma and we do not. Because in war, if you hesitate to kill…even more people may die.” He squeezed her hand one more time, and then let go. “I wish you could have stayed one of the innocent, Nancy. I wish Larry could have too.”

“Until you got stung, I think he still had it in his mind somewhere that the good guys will always win,” Nancy agreed. “He’s grown up a lot...” Malcolm actually flinched, and she frowned, realizing something. Larry _had_ grown up a lot since the coming of the crabions, and the new maturity he seemed to have gained, now that she thought about it, was a little too much and too…well, _stable_ , to have grown out of just one good scare. “It wasn’t just you almost getting killed, was it? You made sure, after, that he _knew_ the good guys don’t always win.”

She hadn’t meant to sound accusing, but it must have sounded that way to Malcolm because he flinched again. “Because they don’t,” he replied quietly. “Even sometimes when they do…they still don’t. The only way I felt I could help him come to terms with what he was feeling was to explain…well, war. What it’s really like, and what it does to people. And why the sacrifice we make is worth it.”

Several things clicked for Nancy all at once. She had always known Malcolm had been military, but until now she hadn’t thought he’d actually _fought_ – she’d assumed that he’d been involved in classified research somewhere, like Cletus had been, and that was why he couldn’t tell anyone anything. But he’d actually fought, he’d apparently seen combat. What kind of war could you not say you’d fought in?

One nobody was supposed to know about, that was what kind. She felt a surge of anger, and not at him. Governments had a tendency to disavow knowledge of things that might make them look bad. Nancy remembered the protests against the war back in her college days that had turned into protests against the soldiers, public sentiment going from supportive to condemning seemingly overnight, and she also remembered how quickly the government could and did try to cover up anything that might fan those flames even higher. The protests might have changed and matured over the decades, but the government’s – any government’s – response to potential embarrassment or vilification in the public eye definitely hadn’t. Had Malcolm walked away from his government once they’d decided that his war, the war that had apparently cost him everyone he’d cared about, needed to be swept under the rug? And then he’d been at loose ends and… “You traded one war for another by coming out here, didn’t you?”

He shrugged, not denying it. “Fighting and surviving is what I know how to do. War…is pretty much the only thing I’m good at.” 

Nancy’s mouth dropped open; obviously she wasn’t the only one having an identity crisis. But what could she say that wouldn’t be just an empty platitude? She could remind him of all the things he’d done in Perfection, all that he _gave_ to his cousin and the rest of the town., but she was fairly certain he’d say those were skills he’d learned in the military, talents he’d developed to ensure the survival of himself and the people he’d worked with. And she couldn’t appeal to any of those people, because apparently they were all gone – she didn’t even know enough about any of them to pretend to know what they might have thought of him or said to him in a similar situation…and that was when the lightbulb came on. There _was_ one of those people she knew something about; she remembered the look she’d seen on his face a few times, watching Tyler and Burt, very obviously missing someone whose name she’d never heard him say out loud. Someone whose loss was still too painful to talk about, who’d meant more to him than being a soldier, more to him than the duties of war. And Nancy could speak for that person, because love was something she knew, the same way Malcolm knew war. “Would _he_ have let you sell yourself short like that?”

Malcolm’s gray eyes widened…and then they clouded over and he looked away. “No,” he admitted quietly. “No, he wouldn’t have. But he’s…gone.”

“That doesn’t mean he’s not still right,” Nancy replied. “You’re worth more than that, Malcolm, you _are_ more than that. He saw it, and we see it too. So if you won’t believe us…believe him.”

He looked at her for a long moment, an ocean of pain and loss visible in his eyes, and then it was gone and he was quirking a smile at her that was partially his, part someone else’s – someone she’d never met and was never going to. “He’d have liked you,” was all he said, and then he was gone and the door was shutting quietly behind him without slamming, the same way it had when he’d come in.

Nancy went back to her dishes, still with a lot to think about but feeling less conflicted than she’d been feeling before –feeling better, in fact, than she’d been feeling for a while even if she hadn’t realized it until now. Malcolm had helped her, she’d been able to help Malcolm…maybe, finally, things were sliding back to their normal same steadiness again in Perfection.

Until the next monster showed up, anyway. Or until the hybrid basil mutated and she got to say I-told-you-so.  


End file.
